A personalized walking bus service requiring optimized route decisions: a real case

We address the design of the lines of a Walking Bus service according to a new paradigm, where children are picked up at home. The scarcity of accompanying persons together with the limit on the length of the deviations from the shortest itinerary of each child make the problem different from the traditional school bus and walking bus design. We propose an arc-based model, a path-based model tackled by column generation, and a heuristic procedure. Solution approaches are tested on a set of real and realistic instances. Real instances refer to the case study of a primary school in Italy.